Disappointingly, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2.2 (for Mac) fails to render this site properly… and I’ve barely implemented one tenth of the CSS I was planning for the coming days. For some reason, IE takes it upon itself to utterly disregard the natural flow of the page, having the paragraphs of my entries sit right on top of my “masthead” <div>. Even adding superfluous CSS statements to my <div>’s and <p>’s like position: static; (which I shouldn’t need to implement) does nothing to slow the shitstorm of misrendering this page experiences under IE5/Mac.

UPDATE: IE5 feels that once the <h1> (for which the “masthead” <div> is a container) is taken out of the flow of the page using position: absolute; (a necessary evil, unfortunately), that it’s open season on that <div>. As far as IE5 is concerned, that <div> is empty and serves no purpose, so it’s free to render right over the top of it. It feels like I’m copping out by playing IE5’s stupid little game, putting a non-breaking space in that <div> just so it doesn’t freak out, but too many people use this trashy browser for me to disregard it altogether.

Safari (Beta 60) fares even worse; it doesn’t even load the page before it crashes. But to be fair, it is only in beta and it doesn’t actually crash… it “stops responding”. Dave Hyatt (though I can’t find the entry… which makes me wonder whether I imagined it all or not) reported other CSS-engine crashes earlier this week when some “web freaks” tried using a few CSS3 pseudo-selectors they knew worked in Mozilla… I guess I can only wait for beta-64 and beyond.

OmniWeb has no trouble with the page, Gecko browsers (Mozilla and Camino) have no trouble with the page, Opera has only a little trouble, and iCab… well let’s just say that iCab does its best, shall we? I’ll be testing Windows browsers tomorrow when my roommate gets up (my PC resides in his room nowadays, since it doesn’t get any use in here), and I can only hope that they fare better.

The most thoroughly disgusting thing about this whole mess it that the only CSS I’ve really implemented is working on the masthead of the page. What the hell is going to happen when I work on the rest?